My Antonia

I was assigned to read My Antonia in seventh grade, didn't like it, and struck Willa Cather off my list of authors to read, until Jennie recommended The Professor's House a few years ago. Since then I've worked my way through Cather's œuvre, and some of her novels rank as my all-time favorites. So I was curious to re-read My Antonia: was I wrong to be unimpressed? Would I see things that had escaped me in seventh grade? The answer is "no." My Antonia is inferior to all the other novels I've read by Cather, and I can't understand why it received so much praise, or why it hasn't been displaced on school syllabi by Lucy Gayheart or (if you want a novel about the making of America, which people do, unfortunately, when they think of Cather) O Pioneers!. It's a hodgepodge, a grab-bag of characters and anecdotes that never come together. Oh, it's not terrible — it has the looseness, the breadth and breath of life, some of the episodes are memorable, and Cather's prose is always graceful, but I'm peeved that I almost missed out on Cather because someone inexplicably thought My Antonia was just the thing for a school syllabus!

This is the best part:

I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over.  When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed.  Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon.  There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.  If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight.  There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.  No, there was nothing but land -- slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side.  I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction.  I had never before looked up at the sky when there was not a familiar mountain ridge against it.  But this was the complete dome of heaven, all there was of it.  I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheepfold down by the creek, or along the white road that led to the mountain pastures.  I had left even their spirits behind me.  The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither.  I don't think I was homesick.  If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter.  Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out.  I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

"Not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made": one could say that My Antonia is not a novel, but the material out of which novels are made.